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BAK Battery unveils RoPower Series to power humanoids, advanced robotics
Industrial Robotics·4 min read

Factory Floors, City Clouds, and the Battery That Keeps Humanoids Moving: Where Industrial Robotics Is Heading Next

By Maxine Shaw

At IROS in late November, a Beijing operator nudged a humanoid in Hangzhou across a 1,200-km network link. Nearby, warehouse cobots began replacing walking time with rolling trays, and battery makers promised 15‑minute recharges for legged robots. The industrial robotics stack is knitting together compute, energy and real‑world data — and the operational calculus is changing fast.

Why this matters now: manufacturers and logistics operators face a familiar constraint — software and AI have outpaced the energy, integration and deployment models that make automation productive on the floor. Recent announcements from RealMan Robotics, BAK Battery, Robust.AI, and municipal compute projects show vendors pivoting to productized hardware, site‑level orchestration and data‑collection strategies that target uptime, throughput and cost per pick.

Powering motion: batteries that change duty cycles

The stakes are concrete. City investments and corporate seed rounds — a $5 million municipal anchor in Rancho Cordova and Rivian’s $115 million spin‑out funding — are channeling capital toward shared compute, fast‑charge batteries and embodied data capture. For operations managers, the question is no longer whether robots can do the work, but whether they can be powered, integrated and controlled at scale without blowing maintenance windows or CAPEX plans.

Robotics uptime is an energy problem as much as a control problem. BAK Battery’s RoPower series, announced November 16, 2025, explicitly targets that constraint with three cell families tuned to distinct duty profiles — peak power, endurance, and rugged cycles — and exacting specs that alter maintenance math. The RoPower18650‑30D claims a 50A discharge capability and a 10%–80% recharge in nine minutes; the RoPower21700‑65E advertises 928 Wh/L volumetric density and 315 Wh/kg gravimetric density; the RoPower4695‑330B promises 280 Wh/kg and 2,000 cycle life with a 15‑minute fast charge.

Compute and orchestration: municipal GPU pools meet warehouse automation

Translate those gains to cost: a 30% runtime increase on a patrol robot or cobot fleet can cut the number of spare packs required per shift by nearly a third and reduce midshift swap labor. For humanoids — which spend energy on balance, perception and actuation at once — each 1 Wh/kg improvement yields more operational payload or longer hours between charging windows, directly shrinking downtime and raising effective throughput per robot.

BAK’s executive vice president Liu Zhibo framed the change bluntly: "Every 1Wh/kg gain in energy density or 0.1C improvement in charging doesn’t just enhance performance — it unlocks new realms of possibility." For floor planners, the practical upshot is the planning horizon: shorter charge windows let operators schedule shorter, predictable maintenance breaks rather than blocking whole shifts for battery swaps, easing integration with conveyor and person workflows.

Data and embodiment: humanoids, home robots, and the industrial data flywheel

Compute is shifting from single‑site clusters to shared city ecosystems. The Human Machine Collaboration Institute and Rapt.AI unveiled a plan, backed by a $5 million City of Rancho Cordova investment and NVIDIA GB10 systems, to provide centralized GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip‑powered nodes for local startups, labs and civic teams. The initiative, slated to begin early 2026, pairs Rapt.AI’s workload‑aware orchestration with FarmGPU’s NeoCloud to let multiple tenants run simulation, fine‑tuning and multimodal training without buying discrete racks.

That model lowers the barrier to entry for operations teams that want to run robot‑grade models but can’t afford dedicated GPU farms. Rapt.AI CEO Charlie Leeming said, "By pairing GB10 systems with Rapt’s platform, Rancho Cordova is proving that municipal AI can deliver enterprise‑grade performance, real accessibility and a sustainable model other cities can follow." From an ROI perspective, shared compute amortizes capital and concentrates expertise, shortening the time between model hypothesis and on‑floor pilot.

At the warehouse scale, software‑defined robots are already delivering measurable gains. Robust.AI’s Carter AMR rollouts at Saddle Creek’s Charlotte facility show how flexible autonomy links to throughput. Deployed in a beauty order fulfillment line across more than 20 drop‑off points, Carter acts as a "virtual conveyor," reducing walking time for tote delivery, increasing tote capacity per trip, and enabling operator‑directed robot actions. Saddle Creek reported smoother floor operations after customization increased payload capacity — a small engineering change with a big effect on lines per hour.

Data and embodiment: humanoids, home robots, and the industrial data flywheel

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